THE SIGNAL
Guides, tutorials, and brutally honest reviews on AI music generation, royalty-free sound, and the future of production. Tune in.
Where Is the Institutional Money in AI Music Generation Actually Going?
You have probably asked yourself some version of this in a Monday meeting: when a private-equity shop or a major label puts real money behind AI music generation, what are they actually buying — and…
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AI Voice Generation for Audiobooks at Scale: Three Production Paths Compared
A mid-size publisher I talked to last winter had 240 backlist titles sitting in a spreadsheet, every one of them text-only, every one of them a candidate for an audio edition that would never get…
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The 40% Problem: A Platform Review of Work-in-Progress Sharing for Artists Who Are Done Begging the Algorithm
There's a number that gets quoted in artist Discords until it loses its edges, and it's worth slowing down on.
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The Training Data Question: What AI Music Generation Owes the Artists It Learned From
Last month I typed a friend's stage name into the search box of a public dataset that several music models were trained on.
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AI Music Training and the YouTube Clause: How Your Catalog Becomes Someone Else's Dataset
There is a sentence in YouTube's terms of service that most artists scroll past on their way to hitting publish.
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AI Voice Generation Is Coming for Audio Ads — But "Set It and Forget It" Is the Wrong Read
First Snap, then Spotify. Within the same stretch of earnings-season optimism, two platforms that sell attention by the second started pitching the same idea to advertisers: describe your product…
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AI Music Generation Has a Consent Problem It Was Born With
An artist opens a search box, types her own name into a public index of AI training data, and watches the results stack up. Not a track or two. Her catalog.
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Meta Platform Development and the $46 Billion Question Behind the Prediction-Market Bet
There's a number that should sit at the top of any memo about a new Meta platform, and it isn't a user count.
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The Quiet Trap in AI Training Data Licensing: What a Dataset's Curation Owns That the Songs Don't
You can clear every single track in a dataset — every Creative Commons attribution, every share-alike clause, every artist credit logged and honored — and still lose a copyright case over that…
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What Did Clive Davis Actually Hear? The Question Behind a Half-Century of A&R
Here is a question anyone who has ever sat in a chair with the power to say yes or no to a song has asked themselves at two in the morning: what was Clive Davis actually hearing that the rest of the…
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The "Open Source" Trap in AI Training Data Licensing: Why a Free Research Dataset Can Still Cost You Millions
A research dataset shows up on a university mirror. A few thousand tracks, neatly tagged by genre, key, and BPM, every file marked Creative Commons, the whole package described in the README as "open…
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The Licensing Question Nobody at the Label Wants to Answer About AI Music Generation
A sync deal I watched fall apart last year didn't die over money or taste. The placement was approved, the spot was cut, the music supervisor loved the track.
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